{"product_id":"anthony-manning-islets-in-pink-polypropylene-lp-half-speed-remastered","title":"Anthony Manning - Islets in Pink Polypropylene LP (half speed remastered)","description":"\u003cp\u003eFormat: LP\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eCat: MG132\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eRelease Date: 2nd July 2021 (back in)\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGenre: Ambient\/Drone\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTracklist:\u003cbr\u003eA1 Untitled\u003cbr\u003eA2 Untitled\u003cbr\u003eB1 Untitled\u003cbr\u003eB2 Untitled\u003cbr\u003eB3 Untitled\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmazing and legendary 1994 album on the equally amazing and legendary Irdial\u003cbr\u003eDisc label, remastered at Emil Berliner Studios in half speed mastering.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe whole album was composed and realized on the Roland R8 drum machine. It followed the same process as the Elastic Variations pieces, with the major addition of many, many hours of editing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach piece was composed as a series of patterns, of varying lengths ( 5,6,7 bars long ). The stock R8 sounds were embellished with one of several ROM sound library cards ( mostly the Dance card, number 10 ).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese patterns were created by tapping out a rhythm, then, in real time, using the Pitch slider as the pattern looped, to create improvised melodies for each of the pattern's voices.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe rough version of each piece was built by stitching the patterns together as a song, listening to each addition over and over, to make sure the melodies flowed into each other in a vaguely coherent manner. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnce this initial rough structure was in place I set about fine tuning every single note.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe R8 doesn't allow you to assign a pitch to a note in the conventional sense. It's not possible to assign a pitch of Middle C to the first note of the first bar. Instead, it assigns a numerical value to a note's pitch, between -4800 and +4800 ( I think those numbers are correct - that little screen is seared into my memory ).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you restrict all notes within a piece to a multiple of, say, 400, you\u003cbr\u003etherefore create the possibility of a sort of scale. For multiples of 400, you have a total number of 24 permissable notes. However, most of the percussive sounds, when pitch shifted, only sounded 'good' over a reduced range.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first editing step was to go through the entire piece, and change every note's pitch to its nearest multiple of 400.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe second step was to draw out the entire piece on graph paper, the Y axis being pitch, X being time. This drawing gave me a visual sense of a melody's flow. It was easy to see too many notes clustering around too tight a pitch range for instance, or a single note straying way down into the lower register while all others at that point in the melody were in the upper.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnce these first 'clearing-up' edits were complete I could set about re writing elements that didn't sound right melodically. Often this meant stripping out whole chunks of superfluous notes, to reveal a cleaner melody line, then shifting its shape slightly. If the flow of the line of dots on the graph 'looked' balanced and sweetly sinuous, then often it sounded so.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis entire process took many weeks per piece. Weeks of doing almost nothing else. Listening. Re-drawing. Re-writing. Listening. Round and round and round. When I could hear the whole thing in my head, from beginning to end, and nothing seemed to jar ( too excessively ), I knew it was done, time to move on.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI imagine it's very similar to the process of stop animation. Your days are filled with painfully tiny incremental changes that seem to be getting nowhere. Then, slowly, a shape, narrative, starts to appear. Then, all of a sudden, somehow, it's done.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen all the pieces were complete the R8 was taken into Irdial's studio where some simple effects were added, each voice recorded individually for clarity onto 8-track tape and mastered onto an ex-BBC half-inch tape deck.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen I slept. And vowed never to do it again.\u003cbr\u003e*****\u003cbr\u003eAnd the title ?\u003cbr\u003eSoon after finishing the pieces I happened to read a magazine article about Christo's \"Surrounded Islands\" installation with the music playing in the background.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere was something about a particular cluster of words within a random sentence that seemed pleasing and somehow appropriate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Islets in Pink Polypropylene\" seemed to make as much sense as anything else.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mental Groove","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":37799369539740,"sku":"MG132","price":22.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0130\/8714\/6043\/products\/MG132.jpg?v=1613478397","url":"https:\/\/www.horizonsmusic.co.uk\/products\/anthony-manning-islets-in-pink-polypropylene-lp-half-speed-remastered","provider":"Horizons Music","version":"1.0","type":"link"}